Affidavit No. 5837/2010

Sworn Statement

After having been warned to tell the truth and nothing but the truth or else I shall be subjected to penal action, I, the undersigned, Ursula Saleh Ayyoub Dar Ayyoub, of Palestinian nationality, holder of ID No. 403810781, born on 30 December 1991, student, and a resident of al-Nabi Saleh, Ramallah district, would like to declare the following:

I recall that on Friday, 29 October 2010, at around 2:30 pm, I was heading to the junction, the entrance to which is located to the north-west of the village. At that time, I had stopped accompanying the weekly marches that were taking place in the village. I was standing and observing the demonstrations next to where some journalists were standing; ten metres away there were many military army jeeps. Some of the border guards disembarked from the jeeps firing various types teargas grenades, as well as rubber bullets - which is a metal core covered in a thin layer of rubber - and also sound grenades, towards the youths who were throwing stones from the top of the hill behind us. Meanwhile some of the soldiers began firing sound grenades at the journalists standing next to me, and one grenade shattered the windshield of a press car. Neither the journalists nor I moved. When the ambulance came to carry an injured man named Atallah Tameem Hassan, I followed the ambulance. As soon as I moved, a soldier standing ten metres away launched a sound grenade and a cylinder gas canister in my direction. I had been looking at the soldier to see whether he would shoot or not, as he had been pointing his gun at me even before I moved. The gas canister hit me on my right leg, close to my ankle. I felt tremendous pain and fell on the floor; I was bleeding heavily from a wound around six centimetres long. It took a few moments for someone to come to my aid because the soldier had fired again towards the back of the ambulance causing the gas to surround me. While I was screaming out in pain, one of them grabbed my hand and took some metal handcuffs from his pocket to arrest me. A number of ladies from the village gathered around me and tried to release me from the soldiers’ hands, and one of the ladies who was speaking with the soldiers informed them that I was injured, and he said in Arabic that they were going to arrest me, and afterwards they would treat me themselves, but with perseverance the women managed to release me and put me in the ambulance, in which I was taken to Salfit hospital. When the ambulance moved, the soldiers fired a gas grenade which struck it on the outside. At the hospital it became clear that there were two breaks in my ankle, and an injury due to the gas grenade, and I received the necessary treatment.